Victory in EPA FOIA Suit

The EPA has released the last cache of documents resulting from our Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA) lawsuit. The efficacy of the FOIA suit has been validated – namely, we won since the suit forced the release of the previously withheld documents.

These documents appear along with all of the other released documents by selecting the EPA DOCUMENTS tab in this blog's header.

Without the suit, we would have never learned of the deceptions by current and former city employees and city councilors. More importantly we would not have learned that the city did in fact violate the Clean Water Act by dumping millions of untreated effluent into the waterways, and that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) aided and abetted in the violation.

In this new release we also see the "environmental specialist" Nancy Ritchie joining the syndicate-led chorus by denigrating the citizens that objected to or simply questioned if decentralized sewer systems are better than the STRP with such despicable puerile comments as "there is a certain core group of individuals that oppose everything" – the standard Arceri-Lazarus-Turk-Tucker-Minozzi-Trotter-Moss-Joel talking point. These are the very same baseless remarks that the FDEP employees were employing in their communiqué to the EPA in an effort to lie about their complicity in violating the Clean Water Act.

The EPA is not in a position to seek enforcement. The State of Florida naturally will not prosecute its own agencies. The City of Marco Island should censure the councilors that oversaw the violations as well as terminate all of those presently employed that were directly or indirectly involved with the violations. But we know this won't happen.

That neither the city nor the state will prosecute those responsible for violation the Clean Water Act is simply indicative of a government that does not enforce the laws due to political expediency. Harming the public health and impairment of the environment has been sanctioned.

But the good news is that the suit is over and the plaintiff (i.e., one person) won. Regrettably, the citizens of the moribund republic lost once again.